Engage Manoa
Project Developers:
Jun Ho Im, Mikel Ishihara, Christian Pak, Sreelakshmi Kutty
Significance and Solution
The University of Hawaii at Manoa offers a multitude of clubs and organizations that are student led and operated. Each semester a festive club drive takes place at the well-known Campus Center, giving these groups a chance to advertise their activities and garner interest. However, after this event, there is not much word about what the campus has to offer for extracurriculars. For this reason, my project partners and I create a website application that allows students to find clubs based on their academic interests and create a list of their own clubs they would like to join. Additionally, students can create administrative accounts that allow them to create new clubs to advertise on the website.
See the user guide for detailed information on how each page works: User Guide
Development
My project partners and I broke the development of this application into three portions (what we called milestones), each focusing on a certain aspect. For our first milestone, we concentrated on building the actual application, which made possible by using a previously completed class project. By modifying the source code and database schema of the previous project, we were able to create the pages and components necessary for Engage Manoa. Milestone one was certainly the simplest portion as we utilized design patterns to streamline the process. Milestone two was a little trickier. My project partners worked to replace the filler data and uploaded existing data from UH Manoa's clubs/organization list. They also updated the filter search function for users to find clubs based on their interests. The final milestone was dedicated to fixing the user interface. While my contribution to the second milestone was limited, I was able to provide more work for this list of tasks. My previous (and brief) experience with website development in high school gave me some ideas as to how we could update the color scheme to be more pleasing to the eye. We had initially chosen a default green color as our focus was more centered around the data and components. Below are the before and after pictures of one of the pages.
Check out the three milestones our team devised to achieve this project: Development
Go through the Developer Guide for detailed information on the tools we used to build this application: Developer Guide
Conclusion
This project was by far a phenomenal experience. While I certainly learned new coding skills and techniques, the most impactful aspect was learning how to work with a team of people I had barely spoken to prior to this project. We ultimately had to take advtnage of each other's strengths but also learn our own weaknesses. As a female in computer science, I have found that speaking up and being able to communicate is more important for me than my male counterparts; and I definitely noticed that in this group project. The project we produced was a team effort involving different backgrounds, and it is worth noting that only two of us are majoring in computer science. This diversity truly helped us gain alternative perspectives and made the overall project quite exciting.